Anti-poverty Programs Failing

Only Elderly Showing Gains

April 16, 1989|By CHARLES GREEN Knight-Ridder Newspapers

WASHINGTON — Jan Reece knows what it feels like to fall behind. A 27-year-old single parent, Reece has worked in a succession of low-paying jobs during the 1980s - at convenience stores, fast-food restaurants and shoe stores - and has been on and off welfare to make ends meet.

"Even when I worked two jobs at a time, it was like I wasn't getting ahead," said Reece, who lives in Springfield, Ore.

Reece, who hopes to break out of the poverty cycle soon, isn't alone.

The gap between the nation's rich and poor widened dramatically during the last decade, recent studies have concluded. One reason for the trend, according to the studies, is that the government hasn't done as much to alleviate poverty as it once did.

Consider the following:

In 1979, 15 percent of all poor individuals had their in- comes lifted above the poverty level by government aid and tax breaks. By 1987, government help moved only 8 percent out of poverty.

In 1976, a mother of two with wages at the official poverty line had real disposable income of $12,604 in today's dollars, after taking into account taxes, government benefits and child-care expenses. In 1988, that family's real disposable income was $9,699, a 23 percent reduction.

Those statistics, and others like them, have prompted increased attention to what the government has and hasn't been doing to combat poverty.

What is emerging from the review is a consensus that the government has done a fairly good job in alleviating poverty among one group - the elderly.

But other groups, particularly the working poor and children, have lost ground.

The increasing hardships faced by these groups has made them the focus of anti-poverty proposals from both members of Congress and President Bush.

But the lack of political clout of the working poor and children, coupled with a lack of consensus on how to combat their poverty, makes it uncertain how much ground they can regain.

What does appear certain is that the strategies the government has successfully used to reduce poverty among the elderly won't be duplicated with other segments of the population. The reason: it costs too much.

The reduction in the poverty rate among the elderly, from 30 percent in 1967 to 12 percent two decades later, has been paralleled by sharply increased spending for Social Security and the rapid expansion of Medicare, the health program for older Americans.

Others with low incomes have not fared as well. Their poverty rates have either climbed or remained high. The incidence of poverty among children, for example, has been as high in the 1980s as it was a quarter century ago when President Lyndon Johnson declared a "War on Poverty."

About 20 percent of all American children live in poverty.

Accompanying their high poverty rates has been a decline in the value of government aid. The value of benefits under Aid to Families with Dependent Children, the federal-state assistance program, declined 37 percent between 1970 and 1987 for a family of three, according to the Congressional Research Service.

In fact, about 60 percent of the increase in poverty between 1979 and 1987 among families with children can be attributed to the declining value of government aid, according to calculations by the House Ways and Means Committee. Stagnant wages and demographic shifts accounted for the rest of the increase.

Spending money is not always a solution, of course. "If a 16-year-old inner city kid has a baby, she's going to be a poverty statistic regardless of what kind of policies we put together in Washington," said Gary Bauer, who was Reagan's domestic policy adviser.

Bauer and others emphasize the need for individual responsibility, and there is no question that the explosion of households headed by unmarried women has contributed significantly to increases in poverty.

There's a 46 percent chance - nearly one in two - that a fe- male-headed household with children under 18 will be poor. But if a husband is present, the poverty odds are 7.6 percent - less than one in twelve.

"There may be problems that are just beyond the government's ability to do more than a little about," said Bauer, who now runs a Washington-based group called the Family Research Council.

That is one reason why much of the current focus in Washington is on the working poor and children: one group is working, trying to better itself. The other can't be blamed for its circumstances.

Neither group has done well in recent years.

In 1987, about 25 percent of poor families had a member who worked full-time job throughout the year. An additional 35 percent had a family member who worked part-time, or full-time part of the year.

Yet government policies have not always helped those families escape poverty. Their work is often met by a sharp reduction in government aid and an increase in taxes.

The problem was illustrated in a Ways and Means report that calculated how increased job earnings affected government benefits for a hypothetical Pennsylvania mother with two children with day-care expenses.